Monday, October 01, 2018

Over the past eight months EW has stalked [Jamie Lee] Curtis and the rest of the Halloween crew — though hopefully in a much less threatening manner than Michael Myers tracks Laurie Strode. The result is a story which includes interviews with Curtis, [David Gordon] Green, [Danny] McBride, [John] Carpenter, and Nick Castle, who once again makes an appearance as Myers in the new film, 40 years after playing the slasher icon in the original movie.

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What is the appeal of, I dunno, hearing some fat woman sing uber-melodramatically in Italian?

Different strokes.

But that's not really equivalent, is it? Terror and mutilation are things that are repulsive to us from an evolutionary standpoint. Yes, of course fear has it biological function, but it's not designed for enjoyment purposes.

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

-- H.P. Lovecraft

I wrote a paper on this topic, Lovecraft's treatment of the unknown, in high school. I reread some of his best known stories recently and I was amused at how intentionally vague he can be, in combination with how ridiculously florid the language is. It's a strange combination, someone will see something scary and it results in a paragraph of the purplest prose imaginable with somehow essentially no details.

I went out to the movies in SF, the theatre happened to be showing the midnight premiere of one of the Saw torture flicks. The people that lined up for that one were a really terrifying collection of humanity.

I can imagine - like I said, not a big fan of those... I think I saw the first Saw - and as noted, saw the Hostel, but not at all my cup of tea.

I make an exception for zombie films - but it's not really the gore that draws me to them (I'd say it's 80% the post-apocalyptic themes/20% the humor).

For the few true "slasher" - which I guess I'd put in a separate category from the pure gore films... Hills Have Eyes is just a really, really creepy -- lonely desert, etc - atmosphere. Texas Chainsaw - the original, I just like for the minimalism and the WTF is happening shock.

Raimi's stuff - the Evil Dead series? There's the cabin in the woods creepiness, the obvious brilliance of Bruce Campbell, and the sly sense of the absurd.

But yeah, the hardcore stuff like the Saw films do not do anything for me. Only seen the original, like I said, but I thought the odd premise was more interesting than the gore or mutilation. I see no reason for there to have been any sequels (well, 'artistically'... I mean, I'm sure the 'reason' was money).

I need to rewatch that, having done so only once, back in early '04, when my zombie movie obsession was just beginning*. In retrospect, it was something like the 23rd such film I'd ever watched (this over a period of about 30 1/2 years). I've added another 300 to the list since then.

*The actual starting point was the aforementioned 2004 Dawn of the Dead, the only movie I've ever paid three times to watch on the big screen. The foundation, though, was laid the previous year with 28 Days Later.

Neither is sadness, I presume, & yet just a few posts back people were listing movies that made them cry.

Yeah, I guess, but it still strikes me as different. Fear and mutilation are, biologically speaking, actively aversive to us. Our evolutionary reaction is to recoil from them. Sadness doesn't trigger that involuntary response.

Yeah, I guess, but it still strikes me as different. Fear and mutilation are, biologically speaking, actively aversive to us. Our evolutionary reaction is to recoil from them. Sadness doesn't trigger that involuntary response.

IDK, setting aside the romanticism of ancestral worship type films -- plenty of good historical films involve elements that we, as a society, would currently recoil from.

I mean, Schindler's List doesn't exactly have a REALLY happy ending.... Neither does the prior-page mentioned Life is Beautiful.

Sickness & death are also actively aversive to us, surely. I for one am fascinated with books on contagion, disease & the like, & that extends to movies. Finding something enjoyable &/or interesting doesn't mean that one wishes to, I dunno, actually experience it or wish to see others cope with its manifestation.

I'll let one of the professors get into details, but of course Aristotle recognized fear as one of the critical emotions we feel to prompt catharsis, which is sort of letting one's pent up emotions flow freely, which feels good and clears the head. Like rubbing one out.

I also considered a number of films that, looking at the reviews - generally do get decent reviews and more "decent films I like more than most people". That would include stuff like Kelly's Heroes, Tremors, and a few others.

Tremors is a legitimately very good film.

I've always liked it since I saw it in the theatre, it's easily in my Top 100 favorite films; but I hadn't really thought about it recently until I watched the Red Letter Media re:view of it.

Was trying to think of a top 10 movies list, but it's probably easier to a do a top 10 "bad" movies I love...

1. Battlefield Earth - the only one I have on this list because I just truly love how cheesy, awful, and ridiculous it is. I still watch it when it shows up on cable. It's like frying cheese whiz in bacon fat. It's not actually that good and it's awful for you, but with the right... enhancement? Ummmm.... yummmm.

Battlefield Earth was the first movie I ever purchased on DVD. I'd seen it before and thought it was hilarious and couldn't resist when I saw it sitting lonely in a "Buy Me Please!" remainder box when I was in line at the Burbank Fry's. Well worth the $3.99, that movie makes me as happy as a baby psychlo on a straght diet of kerbango!

Some more choices I'd add:

The Apple ... not more needs to be added to Nathan Rabin's wonderful write-up for his AV Club series My Year of Flops, but I ... just love this movie. In another world, it would be a cult-midnight screening sensation, like Rocky Horror or The Room. It tells the story of a naive folk signing duo from Canada, who win a prestigious music competition and are then slowly corrupted by the Devil himself, in the form of a top music executive.

Its pleasures are too numberable to fully recount, suffice to say, do you know all of the different drugs people used to take back in the 70's? I can safely say the people involved in making The Apple took ALL of them, in large quantities. There's a musical number that's an ode to methamphetamines (yes, that's a young Catherine Mary Stewart and ... don't blink a young Finola Hughes) and the movie ends with a literal (well, within the movie literal) deus ex machina and in between there's a delight of batshit lunacy.

The Arrival ... IDMB gives the following synopsis of the plot: "Zane, an astronomer, discovers intelligent alien life. But the aliens are keeping a deadly secret, and will do anything to stop Zane from learning it."

I'll simply add ... Zane, an astronomer ... is played by Charlie Sheen.

The Arrival ... IDMB gives the following synopsis of the plot: "Zane, an astronomer, discovers intelligent alien life. But the aliens are keeping a deadly secret, and will do anything to stop Zane from learning it."

I'll simply add ... Zane, an astronomer ... is played by Charlie Sheen.

You're welcome.

IIRC, this one came out around the same time as Jodie Foster's much-lauded Contact. I caught Arrival at the dollar theater maybe 4 miles from my house & found it quite enjoyable. I finally saw Contact maybe a year ago. It certainly didn't suck.

Am about to go watch the final 25 minutes or so of How to Talk to Girls at Parties.

The movie wound up being very, very enjoyable -- off the top of my head, probably my favorite of the year. I'd forgotten that it's basically an expansion of a Neil Gaiman short story (that I haven't read) based somewhat autobiographically on his own first-generation punk youth (he's a year & 6 weeks my junior).

Other than a deliberately Lovecraftian short story or two, I don't believe I've ever read any of Gaiman's fiction, & for that matter offhand I'm not sure I've read any of his comics other than an OK-ish (given my complete lack of interest in Kirby's '70s DC oeuvre, it could hardly have been anything more than that, however skillfully done) adaptation of Kirby's New Gods stuff around a dozen years ago.

Other than the opening New Rose, most of the music was original (& really quite decent). A notable exception was a couple of tracks by the semi-legendary if obscure Homosexuals (think: Desperate Bicycles if they'd been infinitely more prolific), whose singer has a bit role in the film. And whoever did the "Thanks to" listing knew his or her #### -- mentions not only of the obvious Pistols & Damned but also the Buzzcocks, Eater, Lurkers, Stranglers & Vibrators, among others.

The Arrival ... IDMB gives the following synopsis of the plot: "Zane, an astronomer, discovers intelligent alien life. But the aliens are keeping a deadly secret, and will do anything to stop Zane from learning it."

I read this as the tag line for the Amy Adams movie.

Which would be weird because
A] I'm pretty sure her name isn't "Zane" in that movie
B] she's a linguist, not an astronomer
C] The aliens are trying to give her information, not hide it

Here’s movie critic James Berardinelli on The Chase: "As an example of modern cinematic art, The Chase is an utter failure. As a character study, it can’t get past the comic book stage. As a tightly plotted thriller, it’s missing about half the story line. But, as a piece of unfettered, unpretentious entertainment, it hits the bullseye." That’s a perfect distillation of the Good Bad Movie genre. To further Berardinelli’s point, and to give you some highlights if you haven’t seen The Chase, here are a few things that happen:

Charlie Sheen, a children’s party clown, is on the lam after a string of robberies perpetrated by a clown are pegged on him. (They got the wrong clown!)
Charlie Sheen, in order to evade police, takes Kristy Swanson hostage and initiates the titular chase.
Two vigilantes — played by Anthony Kiedis and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, of course — try to apprehend Sheen, only for their car to crash in a fiery explosion.
Swanson empathizes with Sheen, and the two have sex DURING THE CHASE.
At the end of the film, Swanson, now in love with Sheen, steals a helicopter, and the two abscond to Mexico and live happily ever after.

I was watching a movie and in one scene our heroine is watching something on TV. I searched everywhere and couldn't find any source showing WHAT movie she was watching. So I took a few screenshots of it on my laptop:

I watched La La Land last night. Two years behind the curve. Of course it was charming but a fairly light confection. The music, singing and dancing were not of very high quality (I think that was partially intentional), the agonizing the characters do over whether or not to follow your dreams or sell out was pretty tired subject matter. The huge Oscar buzz must have been 99% attributable to the fact that it's a unabashed love letter to Hollywood and Los Angeles. I think that, as television has increasingly (and perhaps definitively) become the medium of serious drama, and film has had to consolidate its few advantages by concentrating more than ever on action and spectacle, Hollywood needs to lean on nostalgia as an attraction for its non-superhero movies.

Neil Gaiman must be the five-tool-player of contemporary culture. Well, four, I guess: screenwriting, comics, adult fiction, children's fiction; and then he also writes constantly about himself and the contemporary scene. I really only know his children's books. Coraline is a classic – a book that seems like it should have been around forever, but is barely 15 years old. La Dernière is re-reading The Graveyard Book right now; she teaches it every year. Gaiman is unusual in knowing children's-book conventions and traditions really well but still being able to write fresh stories in the old modes.

Kyoto band Homecomings have quietly worked their way into becoming one of my favorite current artists. The use of the word quietly is deliberate – theirs is a subtle appeal that doesn’t immediately hit you over the head. A Western parallel might be Camera Obscura, a band with excellent songwriting skills and a good, but non-flashy, singer. Ayaka Tatamino often sings in English, but for this song she uses Japanese. Guitarist Yuki Fukutomi has a knack for coming up with memorable themes that often don’t appear until late in the song – here it doesn’t appear until after the three-minute mark. He did the same thing on “Songbirds”, a great track from earlier this year that was used as the ending song for the anime Liz and the Blue Bird. I shelled out the bucks to buy the Japanese CD-single for that song, figuring it would remain a non-LP track. Homecomings’ new album, Whale Living, is released this week, and includes both that song, and the new song this video is for, “Blue Hour”. Oh, well…

Carmen at the Dallas Opera right now is a very good version, with no notable weaknesses: except maybe a set that, for a couple of acts, required characters to enter on a mezzanine stage left, cross and exit stage right, and then come down a narrow staircase crossing back left again. This was confusing enough when it was one person, but the entire chorus coming and going that way looked like rush hour at Penn Station.

I remember awhile ago somebody was asking the difference between opera and musical, and the (quite useful) distinction that opera is sung through, without spoken dialogue. Carmen, though, has lots of spoken dialogue, almost as much as some modern musicals. It belongs to opéra comique, one of the many older French genres (like ballet-pantomime and comédie-vaudeville) that combined speeches and songs in various proportions. I guess the definition of opera is kinda fluid. You knows it when you hears it.

Carmen is your basic story of male rage turned on a woman who asserts her sexual independence. It's still pretty relevant.

Podcasts are popular culture, right? What do we listen to? I’ll start:

* Blank Check (movies—they focus on directors (“who had massive success early on and were given a blank check to make their own crazy passion project”) , and devote a 2-hour episode to each film in a director’s career. I’ve listened to a lot of movie podcasts, and this is the best—perfect balance of comedy and insight.) They just wrapped up Ang Lee and have moved on to Nancy Meyers.

* The Cinephiliacs: Movies, but with much more of an academic bent. Can be boring and a lot of guests talk about really obscure titles.

* How Did This Get Made: Comedy show about BAD movies.

* Chapo Trap House: Socialism and yuks

*Unbelievable: Religious debate of basically every variety.

* 30 Minutes in the New Testament: Exactly what it sounds like! Hosted by two Lutheran pastors.

* The Dollop: Comedy/history. The host tells the story of an historical event, to his buddy, an improv comedian who has no idea what the topic will be about. The host is a pretty radical Leftist, and his stories reflect that....but often they’re just very very silly anecdotes.

* The Bruenigs: Politics, hosted by two married political columnists. The wife is Elizabeth Bruenig of the Washington Post, who’s probably the highest profile TradCath Socialist around.

* An Earful of Convoy/ An Earful of Cocktail: hosted by a BBTFer, he splits these movies into 5-minute chunks and then devotes a 2-hour episode to each section. Meaning, you know, they spend 50 hours analyzing the movie Convoy. 100% my style of humor!

I thought everything south of the Mason-Dixon line was an Opry. Is that not the case?

After one of the intermissions yesterday, a big guy was squeezing past a little old lady in the first row of the mezzanine. He looked back at her as she passed, and she said to him, "Ah'd jist as soon not pitch over this rile and land on my hade."

* An Earful of Convoy/ An Earful of Cocktail: hosted by a BBTFer, he splits these movies into 5-minute chunks and then devotes a 2-hour episode to each section. Meaning, you know, they spend 50 hours analyzing the movie Convoy. 100% my style of humor!

I have been listening to some podcasts in French lately, not that I understand much of them; but I have faith in the immersion method. One that I stumbled across has people reading from newspapers of a hundred years ago. I found one podcast that was a very stirring analysis of the abdication of the Kaiser in 1918, I thought kind of florid, but hey, it was French only to find it was actually from 1918, but being read very dramatically by a presenter in 2018.

So I just started watching Nightfall on Netflix. A fictionalized account of the knights templar following the fall of the Crusader States. The series begins with the fall of Acre in 1291*, with some of the main characters escaping to France. After the credits, we move to Paris, 15 years later*. So it's presumably 1306. Yada, yada, yada...near the beginning of episode 2, the pope visits the Paris Temple to install a new master, the old one having been murdered by highwaymen in episode 1. He is called Boniface. I decided to look him up, as I am wont to do when viewing historical fiction. Turns out Boniface VIII (which the credits list as the character) died in 1303. In 1306, the Pope is Clement V, who, on Oct 13, 1307, is said to have ordered the arrest and execution of the Templars. I have no doubt that that will play a part in the series.

My question is, why say "Paris, 15 years later", rather than 10 years later, or 12 years later. The 15 years had no other significance other than to present a passage of time. Yes, it's true, few viewers will know of or discover this discrepancy. But why not just try to be accurate in the first place? Maybe the necessity to cheat on the time frame will become apparent later in the series, in that it was crucial that is was 15 and not 10 or 12 years later to move the plot along or for dramatic effect.** But it bugs the hell out of me that writers and directors at times take no care in accuracy, when being accurate costs nothing.

*As specifically stated in written overlay.

** like for example, in Braveheart, where Wallace remains alive during his drawing and quartering long enough to outlive Edward I, when in reality, Edward outlived Wallace by 2 years. It was dramatic license, and understandable.

You've made a pedantry blunder of Brobdingnagian proportions, because the show is spelled Knightfall. Apparently. I just googled it. The other thing I discovered is that the official Netflix blurb begins with the words "Fifteen years after the Crusades..." so I think it's safe to assume that they chose that number because "twelve" would be too distractingly specific.

And, it is made clear shortly after I resumed viewing episode 2. A sub plot emerges, the plan to marry the French King's daughter Isabella to Edward, prince of Wales (to whom she was married in 1308). The real life Isabella was born in 1295, so if this were 1303 with Boniface VIII still alive, Isabella would be only 8 years old. While it was common for royal marriages to be arranged at age 8 and even younger, I suspect the marriage is imminent in the show, and thus the show runners had to decide between fudging the dates of the death of Boniface VIII (1303), and the birth/marraige date of Isabella . They chose the former.

On November 20, 1920, she married Joseph Gousha, an aspiring poet and advertising copy-writer. In 1921, the couple had their only child, Joseph R. Gousha Jr. ("Jojo"). Her husband abandoned poetry for the steady work of advertising, and the family moved to Greenwich Village, which remained her home base for the rest of her life.(...)

Dawn Powell wrote hundreds of short stories, ten plays, a dozen novels, and an extended diary starting in 1931. Her writings, however, never generated enough money to live off. Throughout her life, she supported herself with various jobs, including being a freelance writer, an extra in silent films, a Hollywood screenwriter, a book reviewer, and a radio personality.

Locusts is set right in the thick of these worlds—it’s first and foremost a satire of the New York City publishing industry, but ad-men and Hollywood bigshots and Broadway stars and journalists all pop up as supporting characters, and it’s fully immersive; you could tell it was written by someone who really knew this world.

It was pretty far out of my comfort zone—and I doubt I will read her other novels—but it was still a fun, interesting read.

I thought everything south of the Mason-Dixon line was an Opry. Is that not the case?

FWIW, I went to the Grand Ole Opry a few years back and despite the genre not being my particular cup of tea, I highly recommend it. Don't recall all the acts that night - but Jesse McReynolds, who's probably pushing 90, was a real treat. Montgomery Gentry, Charley Pride, Sara Evans, Gene Watson... the novelty act Riders in the Sky.... It was a fun evening and something I'd certainly do again.

I don't really enjoy pop culture podcasts for some reason. I guess if I can input MY opinion I'm not really interested in hearing other people gab away. It might be why I listen to so much science and history since they're talking about stuff I don't know anything about so I'm content to just listen.

BDC -- here's the passage (from this book) I mentioned to you elsewhere a couple of weeks ago. I'm wondering if any of it resonates with (or engenders any other response from) you, given your delving into European crime fiction:

Many who had been radicalized in the late 1960s or 70s turned to writing works that were inspired by American crime fiction. Dominique Manotti, herslef a historian and Communist activist before she became a writer of detective stories, remarked that May 1968 was the "founding event" for authors such as herself. Didier Daeninckx (born 1949) published Meurtres pour Memoire in 1983 -- a work based on the life and crimes of Maurice Papon, prefect of the Paris police between 1958 and 1967 -- and Le Geant Inacheve (1984) which revolves around a man who looks back on his radical activism in the 1960s before "the face of Pol Pot could be discerned behind the smile of Mao." Cesare Battisti (born 1954) began to write polars while in exile in France after having been convicted of terrorist murder in Italy. Most famously, Stieg Larsson, the Swedish creator of the Millennium series, had been a very young 68er, campaigning against the Vietnam War when he was 14 and joining a Trotskyist movement six years later.

The 68er authors sought to subvert conventional notions of "classic literature" and to redefine notions of crime -- in ways that concentrated attention on the powerful or on the state itself. However, their novels also revealed a change in attitudes to crime and violence on the part of some 68ers. Left-wing movements were themselves held up to scrutiny or mockery -- notably by Thierry Jonquet, a Trotskyist who published some of his novels under the pseudonym of Ramon Mercader, the name of Trotsky's assassin. The heroes of novels were less likely to be idealistic revolutionaries or heroic criminals. Increasingly, they were Chandleresque figures -- disabused policemen or ex policemen. The hero of Jean-Patrick Manchette's Morgue Pleine (1973) was a private detective haunted by the fact that he had, as a gendarme, killed a demonstrator.

We've been watching Atypical on Netflix. Right in my wife's wheelhouse (she was a teacher & administrator in special ed for...35 years was it? So anything to do with autism is going to grab her. But it's not bad, some quite funny. Of course, a lot of it is about the rest of the family, not just them coping with autism (he's 18 and actually a pretty mild case) but other stuff any family might have to deal with (eg teenagers, changing schools, infidelity).

Comedies are always underrepresented on Best lists. Personally, I think being intentionally funny is incredibly difficult and anyone who can do it well is a ####### genius.

Hollywood Handbook - picked it up in August and devoured all available episodes
Heavyweight
This American Life (though episodes have been piling up as the focus has been on current events)
WTF
The /Filmcast
How Did This Get Made - I won't listen to all, but I also once made the mistake of watching a movie just to then listen to an episode. It was...this and...not worth it. Only podcast I've seen live (Superman IV)
PTI (really the only sports talk I've listened to in the last ten years)
Your Kickstarter Sucks
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The Rewatchables (haven't listened to Bill Simmons in years, but if he has a wheelhouse anymore, it's probably talking about 90s movies with his staff)

Extra Hot Great (used to listen to this regularly, now just when I see a topic I want to hear. Think I first got off the train of regular listening when one of the hosts rejected my polite request to not burp while recording.)

The Tobolowsky Files (though no episodes for the last year and a half)

Have had S-Town sitting in my podcast app for over a year. Will I ever get to it? Hmm.

Serial (didn't even know this was back until it was a few episodes in. Have only caught the first so far, but will get to the rest)

I get the impression the answer to that question is "no", but Misirlou will have to answer, unless you want to find out later.

The reviews are fantastically all over the place. I mean, that's probably not exactly accurate, no one thinks it's brilliant; but some people think it's definitely good, and others think it sucks.

It's OK. It's not must see, but it's not bad. If you like medieval dramas, which I do. I loved "The Pillars of the earth", and the sequel "World Without End." Netflix is debuting a series about Robert the Bruce next month.

The 68er authors sought to subvert conventional notions of "classic literature" and to redefine notions of crime -- in ways that concentrated attention on the powerful or on the state itself. However, their novels also revealed a change in attitudes to crime and violence on the part of some 68ers. . The heroes of novels were less likely to be idealistic revolutionaries or heroic criminals. Increasingly, they were Chandleresque figures -- disabused policemen or ex policemen. The hero of Jean-Patrick Manchette's Morgue Pleine (1973) was a private detective haunted by the fact that he had, as a gendarme, killed a demonstrator

Yes, gef, I think this is a major development in European crime fiction post-1968. I have this sense in the back of my head that I read a French crime novel recently where the detective was a 1968 radical. I want to say it was Jean Echenoz's novel Chopin's Move, which is more of a spy story than a policier but which, IIRC, features an old radical now in the dubious employ of the government. But I may be misremembering. If I get a better fix on it I will let you know.

Manchette is a very important figure in this history. He died way too young but did some remarkable things: I recently read Fatale and Three to Kill, very sharp and pretty nihilistic.

Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano, in Sicily, is a police commissioner but has a leftish past. (Camilleri is over 90 now and thus would have been over 40 in '68, but Montalbano is somewhat younger, and as sometimes happens with series heroes, doesn't appreciably age over 20-25 years.)

Daeninckx is a key writer from that era, too. So was Sébastien Japrisot, who started writing crime novels a bit before '68 but then made several of them into films in the late '60s and early '70s: very much the noirish twisty story instead of the straightforward hero from either side of the tracks.

Being in a relationship is truly a dream, but one thing that feels like a nightmare is that my boyfriend is obsessed with podcasts, which involves listening to people talk that are not me. Every ####### minute of the day he’s got his buds in his ears listening to two men discuss humans becoming cyborgs, or three men eating their way through Tuscaloosa, or four men reviewing bad movies. It’s like if I’m not sponsored by Blue Apron, he won’t listen to my inane thoughts about barbecue sauce! That’s why I decided to take control of my relationship and start a podcast just so my nerd ass boyfriend will listen to me.

And it wasn’t easy; something people don’t mention about podcasts is that starting a podcast is hard! “How do you even record one?” I shouted at no one in the shower. I scoured the Internet for help and turns out there are more podcasts than there are children in the world

something people don’t mention about podcasts is that starting a podcast is hard! “How do you even record one?”

I had to buy a special headset and join Skype to get my weekly podcast started 2 months ago. I told my younger co-host that if his dog wakes up tomorrow and starts quoting Shakespeare, he should be less surprised than this development.

yesterday, with some assistance, I figured out how to scan my business receipts to my employer (I upload them; I'm more of a download sort of guy, but this is the world as we know it in 2018). I will say that even if one is adept at such stuff, it's less convenient now to put in for expenses than it was 20 years ago - such is progress, I suppose.

And it wasn’t easy; something people don’t mention about podcasts is that starting a podcast is hard! “How do you even record one?” I shouted at no one in the shower. I scoured the Internet for help and turns out there are more podcasts than there are children in the world

Almost bizarrely podcasts just aren't convenient for me. The only time I'm going to listen to a podcast is while I'm driving to and from work and I'm certainly not going to plan out my commutes ahead time and set up a playlist of podcasts for my drives.

I've had some good luck with commutes. For a couple years my walk to work (40 minutes or so) was an ideal time for many podcast episodes. Now I've got about a half hour walk to my girlfriend's place, so I'll have to scope out some slightly shorter podcasts.

Walking is really the only time I find I can listen to a podcast. I find it difficult to just sit and listen to one.

Almost bizarrely podcasts just aren't convenient for me. The only time I'm going to listen to a podcast is while I'm driving to and from work and I'm certainly not going to plan out my commutes ahead time and set up a playlist of podcasts for my drives.

Is this hard? I just listen to a podcast and if it ends before my commute is up I tell my phone to play an album or a Spotify radio station.

Walking is really the only time I find I can listen to a podcast. I find it difficult to just sit and listen to one.

I can't just kick back and listen to one either, but with the commute, the dog walking, the yard work and that I have a job where I can listen to music/podcasts all day long I burn through a lot of podcasts and audio books.

Is this hard? I just listen to a podcast and if it ends before my commute is up I tell my phone to play an album or a Spotify radio station.

I have little to no desire organizing my podcasts ahead of time. I get in my car, plug my phone into the charger, and Pandora comes on. It shuffles the songs up adequately enough. I have no desire scrolling through podcasts or even worse scrolling through podcasts while I'm on the highway because the one I selected turned out to be boring.

My favorite podcast unmentioned so far is "In Our Time," the BBC radio broadcast. Three academics present a topic of history or philosophy or the arts or such. It's pretty dry, and I forget everything immediately afterwords, and I'm not sure why I like it so much, but I do. Something soothing about those professorial British accents.

One that I listened to recently that people might enjoy is "Song Exploder." A musician discusses his or her song in great detail, with aid of the master tracks, isolating each little bit and explaining the decisions behind every element. Like, they'll isolate a bassline and talk about exactly why the bass sounds the way it does. I found the Liz Phair song "Divorce Song" to be particularly enjoyable and enlightening - amazing how much thought and good taste goes into what is known as a classic of raw, indie and low-fi rock.

One that I listened to recently that people might enjoy is "Song Exploder." A musician discusses his or her song in great detail, with aid of the master tracks, isolating each little bit and explaining the decisions behind every element.

The used to have a show called Classic Albums where a musician would go through the tracks and discuss it. Paul Simon etc. It was fascinating. Even with bands I do not really like such as Fleetwood Mac, were great. The amount of work on some of these is amazing. I remember watching one on Steely Dan for Aja. The choices they made, the session artists they chose. Really loved it.

Horror: This isn't universal but: I'm close to someone who is somewhere between "layman expert" and "should be teaching this as part of their academic post" wrt horror, which is a genre I've never cared for or identified with - and we got to talking about trauma. In a world where some feel at risk (this includes anxiety) for whatever reason (including gender violence - note the preponderance of horror/true crime fans that are women), these productions can offer a packaged version of evil/violence/dread that is contained, fictional, possibly understandable, does not impact you directly, that may have a solution or happy ending.
This made sense to me.

I caught both The Sisters Brothers and The Old Man & the Gun last night, which are both quite good (particularly the former, the first English -language movie from the great French director Jacques Audiard, a western set in 1850s Oregon starting John C Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhall and Riz Ahmed.) Not much to say beyond “great story, very well told” but, hey—that’s not easy!

(The latter is just an unabashed love letter to “Robert Redford, Movie Star,” and is consequently charming as all hell.